At least one user on Twitter [1] has speculated that the official attendance figure was inflated. The source is not exactly unbiased so it probably doesn't merit addressing in the article, at least not unless and until it is corroborated by other sources. --mwalimu (talk) 12:52, 17 September 2015 (EDT)

I found a video of the fursuit parade in which I counted 89 participants (give or take a couple; there are a couple of spots where it was hard to keep track of who I had counted). There is also a group photo in this tweet; I gave up trying to get an accurate count from it but the estimate I came up with from my attempts to count was reasonably close to the 89 figure above.

So what does this have to do with attendance? Using the reported attendance figure of 658, that gives 89/658 = 13.5% as the fursuit parade participation rate. I ran the same calculation for 18 other furry conventions in the last year (all US or Canada, all with 400+ attendees) and the lowest figure for any other convention was 18.2% at Further Confusion. Three others were below 20%, three were in the 20-22.55% range, seven were in the 22.5-25% range, and four were above 25% (the highest being IndyFurCon with 30.3%). Also note that FAU's own figures for 2013 and 2014 were 18.7% and 20.1% respectively. Which makes one wonder why FAU 2015 has a figure as low as 13.5%.

While we can't rule out the possibility that for some reason this convention had an unusually low fursuit participation rate, it seems more likely that one of the two numbers is wrong. We can be pretty confident of the 89 figure based on the video and group photo above, though it may be slightly off. That leaves the attendance. To make the numbers a little easier, we'll bump the parade figure up by one to 90. Using hypothetical attendance figures of 500, 450, 400, and 360, we would get participation rates of 90/500 = 18.0%; 90/450 = 20.0%, 90/400 = 22.5%, and 90/360 = 25.0%. In other words, to get a fursuit parade participation rate consistent with other conventions (and FAU itself the two previous years), we'd have to use an attendance figure below 500, possibly below 400.

I'm going to withhold speculation on how the "official" attendance figure was arrived at, and once again we can't rule out that the fursuit parade participation rate was unusually low for some reason, but based on this analysis, my conclusion is that the assertion that the 658 attendance is inaccurate gets a rating of "plausible". --mwalimu (talk) 14:08, 18 September 2015 (EDT)

At least one major event during the con (Friday night's dance) was allegedly canceled due to low turnout and a video posted by a FAU staffer shows five people at it. The other dances are documented on Twitter with what appears to be very low attendance (here is video of Saturday night's dance with three people on the dance floor.) I find it hard to believe that a relatively small total attendance drop of 60 people would result in major events like dances being virtual ghost towns. I would bet the number Dragoneer stated as the "attendance" was actually the total number of badges sold, not the actual count of people that were there. Murrypurryfurry (talk) 04:57, 19 September 2015 (EDT)

If you mean the count included people who pre-registered but didn't actually attend, I would allow that on Dragoneer's part, as I know for a fact that at least some other conventions include those in the "official" counts (as much as the statistics geeks might wish all the conventions followed a consistent and concise set of practices for counting and reporting numbers like attendance and fursuit parade, the fact is they each have their own rules and we do the best we can with the numbers we're given). It's certainly possible that all the FA drama that happened during the month or so before the con resulted in an unusually high number folks who had pre-registered deciding not to attend, but to make the numbers work, you'd need more than 150 pre-registered non-attendees, which doesn't seem very plausible. Can you think of other "badges sold" that he might have included? At least one other convention includes unredeemed night badges in the count, but there you're talking about a small number, probably no more than a dozen (and there also, some other conventions count these). --mwalimu (talk) 11:58, 19 September 2015 (EDT)